Eyes Turned Skyward
by Pouncer
Summary: Sydney's science project was maddening in his ability to tackle dogooder causes and thwart Miss Parker's investigative efforts, but at least he wasn't boring. Pairing: Jarod and Miss Parker. General first season spoilers.


**Eyes Turned Skyward**

by Pouncer

Boredom was not a state Miss Parker tolerated well.

The only thing worse than one of Jarod's little tricks showing Miss Parker up was sitting around the Centre waiting for a new breadcrumb to appear so she could start the chase again.

Sydney's science project was maddening in his ability to tackle do-gooder causes _and_ thwart her investigative efforts, but at least he wasn't boring.

Unlike her life at the moment.

Weekly staff meetings were a waste of Miss Parker's time, but she was aware of the political advantages to feigning interest while idiots prattled on about budget consumption and performance metrics.

Centre employees who didn't pay attention didn't tend to last, and Miss Parker wasn't going the way of the dodo.

There were enough eyes scrutinizing her every move after the Florida hurricane debacle, even with her deal with her father and Mr. Raines. She kept her face blank, and stared out the conference room windows until she could escape.

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Time to scare Broots.

He was always reliable when Miss Parker wanted to improve her mood. Watching him flinch fed something predatory in her soul.

She stalked into the tech room, finding Broots and Sydney hunched over a computer monitor.

"No porn on Centre time," she barked out, and then smiled while Broots attempted to explain that he'd never, there was a message.

Miss Parker's eyes narrowed. "Well, well," she purred. "What is Jarod up to now?"

The screen showed a picture of a bird, outlined on stone.

"It's a petroglyph," Sydney said. "We're trying to figure out what it means."

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The Pretender couldn't seem to cut the ties that kept him tethered to the Centre. Miss Parker mulled it over on the flight to Albuquerque. With his skills and intelligence, Jarod could easily disappear without a trace.

Instead, he kept sending them clues. His messages were rarely straight-forward notes on paper, but they solved even the most baroque of his puzzles eventually. It led to last-minute escapes as he slipped through their hands, but he must know that he was only drawing them to him.

Sydney had theory upon theory about attachments formed in childhood, and brilliance like Jarod's best being nurtured in a hothouse environment. "You weren't made for the outside world," Sydney had told Jarod more than once, and Miss Parker suspected Jarod found that as condescending and maddening as she would have in his position.

Maybe his games were an attempt to prove that he _was_ made for the outside world.

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The air in Albuquerque was dry -- a welcome change from Delaware's spring humidity.

Miss Parker couldn't say the same thing about the sun. She slipped dark shades over her eyes and lit a cigarette while Broots collected their baggage.

This was probably going to be another waste of time, but she'd made a commitment to the Centre and she'd try her damnedest to capture Jarod and bring him back to his glass cage. Her reward would be worth it.

"Where do we start?" she asked Sydney, who'd spent the flight muttering over printouts.

"Old Town, I think," he said, cultured European tones suggesting curiosity and eagerness to solve Jarod's latest trick.

"Fabulous," she said, and used the toe of her Ferragamo pump to stub out the cigarette butt.

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Old Town was a square with pueblos run amuck, low brown adobe walls everywhere, capped by a historic-looking church to the north. Natives hawked jewelry on the east edge of the square, tables full of turquoise and silver outside their shops.

A little boy, maybe six or seven, came up to Miss Parker and handed her a brooch.

She tried to give it back. "I don't want this."

Winds swirled dust into funnels, and the sky above was so blue it hurt.

"It's a gift," the boy said. "From Jarod."

She looked at the brooch -- a silver eagle with turquoise body and wings spread -- then over at Sydney, weary beyond belief of cryptic talismans even ones of exquisite craftsmanship.

"Let me see it," he said.

For all her disgust at Jarod's tactics, Miss Parker didn't want to surrender the brooch. It felt cool and pleasant and he'd sent it to _her_. Eventually, she forced her fingers to relax and let Sydney take it.

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They followed the eagle through Jarod's usual labyrinth, from ancient rock art to cutting-edge laser technology, until she found herself on a hiking path just off the main Albuquerque highway. A mountain ridge rose before the horizon, but this area was flat and dry and full of scrub. The ground was dun-colored, boulders everywhere.

Miss Parker wished she'd worn sturdy shoes and jeans instead of heels and a skirt. Clothing was armor, but this trim black Prada suit was for the corridors of the Centre, not the Wild West.

Pebbles crunched underneath her shoes and she scanned the vegetation beside the path -- yucca and creosote bush and prickly pear cactus with the occasional lizard darting motion -- in an attempt to divine Jarod's intent.

"Did he discover Louis L'Amour?" Parker asked Broots, who of course had no answer.

The vision of Jarod on a horse was more appealing than she'd ever admit.

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Sydney had found some local with a hard luck story; Miss Parker didn't care about the details. Blah, blah, vigilante justice and psychological retribution.

What mattered was where Jarod would be: at the top of the Sandia Peak Aerial Tram.

"Stay close," she told Sydney and Broots, checking that her gun was loaded correctly before slamming the car's gearshift into park.

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The doors to the tram slid shut just after Miss Parker entered. She whirled and gestured outrage to Sydney and Broots, who were still on the loading platform, huffing from the steps. Then the tram started moving, and she saw their confused faces grow smaller and smaller.

"Hello," said a familiar voice, and she shut her eyes.

Of course.

"What?" she said, the same way she'd answer her phone, frustrated and angry.

"Now, now," he chided. "That's no way to greet an old friend."

She turned, pulling her gun and aiming it at him, for form's sake. "We were never _friends_, Jarod."

Never that. A million things to each other, each one more complicated than the last, but nothing that could be labeled simple friendship.

She wished for a way to speed this rattletrap onward to where she could collar him and drag him back to show the Tower what she was made of.

"It takes fifteen minutes to get to the top," he told her, jeans and t-shirt and hiking boots wrong for the precise way he formed his words.

"I hope Sydney commandeers a helicopter," she muttered. Neither of them was going anywhere, and he wouldn't hurt her -- she had ample proof of that from their previous encounters. She holstered her gun and prepared to wait. Maybe she could find an advantage inside the tram.

It was huge, windows everywhere, and the two of them were completely alone. She didn't know how he'd maneuvered that, and she didn't really care.

Did she have handcuffs in her bag?

"Sunsets are beautiful from here," he said, and moved closer.

"So?" She backed toward the windows.

"You ought to take the time to enjoy one." His voice lowered, to that gentle, innocent tone that made her knees weak.

"I'll be happy to," she said, laced with venom, "when you're safe and sound back at the Centre."

His face was stubbled, the end of a long day, and she couldn't help but focus on his wrists and forearms. Tendon and muscle and hair -- his hands reached for her, and there was no where else to retreat.

She could have attacked. She could have put her combat skills to use and taken him down, but instead she closed her eyes and almost gasped when his fingers skimmed her waist, tipped her chin up. She opened her eyes then, met his too-knowing gaze, and waited.

His lips were warm, deft, improved over their first kiss so many years ago. They weren't children anymore; he wasn't cloistered away from temptation. She'd embraced carnal delights years ago, even if her dance card had been filled with "capture escaped genius" lately.

He tasted spicy, and smelled of the wide outdoors. And God, he was _really_ good at this. She nipped at his lips, determined not to yield without a skirmish, and his tongue licked into her mouth.

She moaned then, let her arms wrap around his chest. Firm muscles underneath her palms; she pulled him closer. Her back was pressed against the window, and she raised one knee up to encircle his hip.

Jarod gasped, surged forward, and she had to break the kiss to inhale, brain shut down and every cell of her body intent on sensation. His lips moved to her neck, bit gently at tendons, and she slid her hands down to his ass in retribution.

He laughed, soft breaths puffing against damp skin. She shivered, eyes jittering around in search of distraction. Cliffs grew closer, twisted pines growing out of the side of the rock face.

"Hey now," Jarod said. She tilted her head back, tried to think.

"Was this part of your latest plot?" she asked, wanting to give in and ride him to completion, but scared he'd leave her looking a fool.

"No plot." His palms moved to cup her breasts, fingers teasing her nipples into points. "Just this." He took her mouth again in a deep kiss, and she let herself surrender.

Time hung suspended between earth and sky on a thin steel cable, just like the two of them. This moment apart from the world, she could let herself do nothing but feel and react and press closer to his warmth.

Long, drugged kisses, and she started to wonder, wildly, if they could have sex right here, open for the birds and any deviant with binoculars to see. He was hard against her belly, intoxicating friction, and her hips started to rub up and down. She wanted to taste his skin, tugged the neck of his t-shirt aside, mouthed his collarbone.

They spiraled ever higher, and she was almost gasping now, reaching, desperate--

The tram shuddered to a halt, its doors screeched open, and Jarod backed away, fast.

Miss Parker blinked, shook her head, tried to cross back into reality.

"I'm sorry," he said, and ran.

Second stretched in disbelief before she moved, careened onto the platform, searching, pushing past bodies who _weren't him_ and didn't matter as anything but obstacles.

_There_ -- he was, what was he doing?

Preparing to fly.

She gaped, incredulous, as he strapped himself in and launched the hang-glider into nothingness.

Black wings stretched, caught air, and sailed into the sunset. Strata upon strata of clouds tinted pink and purple and orange, a symphony of beauty underlit by the last of the sun's rays and dotted with Jarod's rapidly-diminishing figure.

She could do nothing but watch.

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Sydney and Broots arrived on the next tram. They found her where she stood at the edge of the platform, smoking a much-needed cigarette and drinking in the colors as the sun slipped beyond the edge of the world.

"Jarod?" Sydney asked.

Miss Parker gave him a dirty look. "He got away." She took one last drag on her cigarette and said, "Come on. Back to the Centre."

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Two days after she got home, a package was delivered to her house. A large box.

She stumbled over it when she arrived at the end of the day, snorted, and decided to pour herself a drink and change.

She touched the silver and turquoise eagle brooch on her dresser before she went to wrestle the box inside.

A kitchen knife slit the packing tape neatly, and she unfolded cardboard edges to find white fabric printed with the same figure of a bird she'd seen on Broots' computer screen, before Albuquerque.

She lifted it out of the box, ran her fingers over the light frame, examined the spool of thread that would keep the kite tethered to the ground.

There was a note inside, Jarod's writing bold against the fine cotton rag:

_Learn to fly._

_For me?_

-end-

_Notes:_ My knowledge of Albuquerque is based on a 24-hour business trip back in '97 and what I found on Wikipedia. Trobadora did an outstanding beta job; all remaining mistakes are my own. Title from Henry Van Dyke, "When once you have tasted flight you will always walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward: for there you have been and there you will always be."

_Disclaimer:_ Sadly, neither Jarod nor Miss Parker belong to me. This story was written for love, not profit.

_Miss Parker craves feedback like she wants to find Jarod. Distract her for a little while?_


End file.
